3:45 p.m.
Brennan C. Plassmeyer: Bio 198 Independent Study in Experimental Ecology Advisor: Catherine McFadden, Vivian and D. Kenneth Baker Professor in the Life Sciences and chair, Department of Biology In my independent study Experimental Ecology laboratory course, I designed and carried out experiments to test hypotheses about the complex ecological interactions underlying species diversity, habitat associations and effects of abiotic and biotic factors on growth rates of organisms. I will present the results of one of the experiments that I completed during this semester, focusing on its experimental design, implementation and analysis.
4 p.m.
Natasha A. Parikh: Visual Selective Attention to Pleasant Foods: A Neurological Study Advisors: Elizabeth Glater, assistant professor of biology; Catherine L. Reed, professor of psychology, Claremont McKenna College Food is advertised everywhere, but Americans struggle with obesity and eating disorders. The mixed media creates a conflict: Should we pay attention to food or avoid it for health’s sake? Using high-density electroencephalography, I investigated the neural substrates of selective visual attention to food cues and whether these neural markers were modulated by people’s eating behaviors and body satisfaction. Hungry participants performed a dot-probe attention task that cues a food and a non food. After eating one food, they were tested again to determine if their attention to specific food cues changed as a result of satiety. Satiety and differences in eating and body image may affect automatic attention orienting. This study could have implications for understanding eating disorders.
Shanahan 1430 | Afternoon Mathematics 1:30 p.m.
Alexa Serrato: Reed’s Conjecture and Cycle-Power Graphs Advisor: Nicholas Pippenger, professor of mathematics Reed’s conjecture is a proposed upper bound for the chromatic number of a graph. Reed’s conjecture has already been proven for several families of graphs. I show how one of those families of graphs can be extended to include additional graphs and also show that Reed’s conjecture holds for a family of graphs known as cycle-power graphs, and also for their complements.
1:45 p.m.
Tongjia Shi: Random Permutations Advisor: Nicholas Pippenger, professor of mathematics Random permutations are among the most natural mathematical structures, but we still don’t know everything about them. Here, we will focus on the ordered cycle lengths of a random permutation and ask questions like, “What’s the expected length of the shortest cycle in a very large random permutation?” Historical research has given partial and complicated results, which are unsatisfactory considering the simplicity of the problem. We will complete the missing results and provide a unified description for the ordered cycle lengths of these random permutations.
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